Monday, February 27, 2012

"Circus, spaghetti, sex and cinema"

Tonight I’m inspired by the artistic process of the people who write and direct movies.

The Academy Awards are on, and my Sunday reading has included magazine and newspaper interviews with a number of screenwriters and directors describing their craft, work methods and challenges.

These are no Hollywood hacks or flash-in-the-pan hit-makers – all are well-established storytellers whose names – or whose movies – you will probably recognize.

I decided to pull the thought that struck me most out of each of the articles I read today and see what I could learn. So here goes:

Speaking about her movie In Darkness, an Oscar-nominated Polish film about the Holocaust, director Agnieszka Holland (The Washington Post, February 24) “lists many potential dangers of addressing the Holocaust in a fictionalized feature: ‘Being moralistic, being sentimental, looking for some good-feeling lesson coming from this experience, because I think it’s impossible to have one. Making all the Jewish characters some kind of faceless angels. To make it black and white. To make it accusatory. To recreate clichés that have already been told many times.”

Holland did extensive research for the film, which was set in the sewer systems of Lvov, visiting “at least 10 sewer systems in different cities.” She also had the original screenplay, which was in English, translated into several languages to convey authenticity. “Only a small part of the audience can appreciate it,” she tells the Post's Mark Jenkins. “But I think it’s like music. If the music is different, you feel the movie differently.”

“I love what I do, but the screenplays don’t happen in the white heat of inspiration. It’s the oldest trick in the book. I get up at five o’clock in the morning and I work flat out until I’m exhausted. I may not be the smartest guy on the block, but goddammit, I am the most tenacious! … It’s like the salt flats. The sun rises – I write. The sun goes down – I’m done.”

Later in the same issue, Charlotte Chandler writes about master filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini: “Fellini told me, “I feel my inheritance as a film director is from art, and Michelangelo’s is from literature. My films, like my life, are summed up in circus, spaghetti, sex, and cinema.”

The Washington Post’s February 26 business section examines the leadership style of three leading directors – Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Stephen Spielberg. A few thoughts from each:

Allen “displays a remarkable sense of calm when at work, a confidence and security that are the antithesis of his public image, and both the crew and actors take their cue from him.”

He trusts the actors to do their job [“hire the best actors, shut up and get out of their way”] runs a set that lacks “preciousness,” remains accessible and keeps things simple -- he works “mainly in single master shots and doesn't bother shooting coverage from numerous angles.”

“Spielberg’s obsessive-compulsive nature helps account for his intense concentration on his craft, his unrivaled technical skills and his insistence on perfection from his crews. But he has learned how to surround himself with a small comfort zone of longtime collaborators he trusts implicitly, …”

Learning to delegate was an important early lesson for Spielberg, the article notes. But his “ability to do it all himself, if need be, serves him well.”

Scorsese is singled out for the way he marries passion and discipline; structure and improvisation.

He is quoted saying: “I was raised with gangsters and priests, that’s it, nothing in between. I wanted to be a cleric. I guess the passion I had for religion wound up mixed with film. And now as an artist, in a way, I’m both gangster and priest.”

Hard work and discipline, authenticity and careful research, confidence in their own vision coupled with a willingness to bend and to let others shine through -- that's what it takes to create a great story, according to these screenwriters and directors. That, plus passion: the risk-taking of gangsters and the faith of priests.

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About Me

"For we are the cultural mulattos
The bats
Neither animals nor birds
Hanging in balance."
This Indian poem flew out of a cloth-bound book I was cataloguing at Cambridge University Library and hung upside down in my head. I had just moved to England after spending my childhood in the Middle East and Africa. Twenty years and another international move later, I am still hanging in balance, embracing my life as a cultural mulatto.
This blog includes some of my reflections on the cross-cultural experience.
For a selection of my writing, please visit my online portfolio at http://lucychumbley.com/